POETRY. In modern criticism the word poetry (i.e. the art of the poet, Gr. IroLnri/s, maker, from 7rOCEI,P, to make) is used sometimes to denote any expression (artistic or other) of imagina tive feeling, sometimes to designate a precise literary art, which ranks as one of the fine arts. As an expression of imaginative feeling, as the movement of an energy, as one of those great primal human forces which go to the development of the race poetry in the wide sense has played as important a part as science. In some literatures (such as that of England) poetic energy, and in others (such as that of Rome) poetic art is the dominant quality. It is the same with individual writers. In classical liter ature Pind2r may perhaps be taken as a type of the poets of energy; Virgil of the poets of art. With all his wealth of poetic art Pindar's mastery over symmetrical methods never taught him to "sow with the hand," as Corinna declared, while his poetic energy always impelled him to "sow with the whole sack." In some writers, and these the very greatest—in Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and perhaps Goethe—poetic energy and poetic art are seen in something like equipoise. It is of poetry as an art, however, that we have mainly to speak here ; and all that we have to say upon poetry as an energy is that the critic who, like Aristotle, takes this wide view of poetry —the critic, who, like him, recognizes the importance of poetry in its relations to man's other expression of spiritual force, claims a place in point of true critical sagacity above that of a critic, who, like Plato, fails to recognize that importance.
With regard to poetry as an art, most of the great poems of the world are dealt with elsewhere in this work, either in connection with the names of the writers or with the various literatures to which they belong; consequently, these remarks must be confined to general principles. Under VERSE the detailed questions of prosody are considered : here we are concerned with the essential principles which underlie the meaning of poetry as such.
All that can be attempted is to inquire : (I) What is poetry? (2) What varieties of poetic art are the outcome of the two great kinds of poetic impulse, dramatic imagination, and lyric or egoistic imagination? Definition of Poetry.—Definitions are for the most part
alike unsatisfactory and treacherous; but definitions of poetry are proverbially so. Yet some definition must be here attempted; and, using the phrase "absolute poetry" as the musical critics use the phrase "absolute music," we may, perhaps, without too great presumption submit the following: Absolute poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language.
This, at least, will be granted, that no literary expression can, properly speaking, be called poetry that is not in a certain deep sense emotional, whatever may be its subject-matter, concrete in its method and its diction, rhythmical in movement, and artistic in form.
That the expression of all real poetry must be concrete in method and diction is obvious, and yet this dictum would exclude from the definition much of what is called didactic poetry. With abstractions the poet has nothing to do, save to take them and turn them into concretions; for, as artist, he is simply the man who by instinct embodies in concrete forms that "universal idea" which Gravina speaks of—that which is essential and elemental in nature and in man ; as poetic artist he is simply the man who by instinct chooses for his concrete forms metrical language.
As an example of the absence of concrete form in verse take the following lines from George Eliot's Spanish Gipsy: "Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken ; even your loved words Float in the larger meaning of your voice As something dimmer." Without discussing the question of blank verse cadence and the weakness of a line where the main accent falls upon a positive hiatus, "of the unspoken," we would point out that this powerful passage shows the spirit of poetry without its concrete form. The abstract method is substituted for the concrete. Such an abstract phrase as "the unspoken" belongs entirely to prose.